Jonathan Brownhttp://www.drjonathanbrown.com
Associate Professor of Islamic CivilizationSun, 26 Jul 2015 17:34:27 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.7Tom Holland, the Five Daily Prayers and they Hypocrisy of Revisionismhttp://www.drjonathanbrown.com/2015/tom-holland-the-five-daily-prayers-and-they-hypocrisy-of-revisionism
http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/2015/tom-holland-the-five-daily-prayers-and-they-hypocrisy-of-revisionism#commentsSun, 26 Jul 2015 17:28:28 +0000http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/?p=344On a radio show on BBC 4 a couple of weeks ago, Tom Holland raised his claim (made originally in his book In the Shadow of the Sword on the origins of Islam) that the famous five daily prayers in Islam were not originally part of the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings. They were actually imported into the religion from Zoroastrianism well after the death of the Prophet Muhammad and after the Muslims had conquered the greater Middle East. Holland sets his story in the environs of the city of Kufa in southern Iraq in the mid eighth century. The Muslim practice of praying five times a day, he argues, resulted from Islam, in effect, imitating Zoroastrian practice. More specifically, Zoroastrian converts to Islam in Kufa brought with them practices such as the five daily prayers from their own religion (Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, 405).

Holland’s evidence for this is an observation supposedly made by Rav Yehudai Gaon, who was the senior Jewish scholar of the Suru rabbinic academy near Kufa from 757 CE until his death in 761. Rav Yehudai is quoted as remarking that Zoroastrian converts to Islam retained some aspect of their previous religion. Holland writes, quoting Rav Yehudai, “The hearts of those mowbeds [Zoroastrian priests] who had ‘converted to the religion of the Ishmaelites,’ so he reported, were still not entirely clear the trace of their former beliefs, even down to the third generation: ‘for part of their religion still remains within them.’”

Holland belongs to a school of historical thought known as revisionism, which criticizes mainstream Western scholarship on early Islamic history for relying too much on historical sources that 1) are written by Muslims, and therefore biased towards Islamic orthodoxy, and 2) postdate the events they describe by many decades or centuries, during which time the ‘true’ description of events must have been adjusted by the faithful to fit with the orthodox sacred Islamic history that had gelled during the intervening period. So we should not believe that the Muslim scholar Ibn Ishaq’s (died 767) famous biography of the Prophet is a historically reliable source for the events of the historical Muhammad’s life because 1) Ibn Ishaq was a Muslim writing a sacred history of a figure who had become a fixture in his religious tradition and was not being approached objectively, and 2) Ibn Ishaq was compiling his biography some 140 years after the death of the Prophet. To take Ibn Ishaq as reliable would be like historians a century from now writing the history of the American Civil War based on documents written in 2015 by Americans who all celebrate the victory of the North over the South.

To solve this problem of historical sources, revisionists have proposed relying on non-Muslim sources for the early Islamic period, some of which do date from early on (for example, the writings of the Armenian bishop Sebeos come from the 660’s CE) and are not colored by pro-Islam bias.

I could go into a long critique of the revisionist approach here, but that is totally unnecessary. Holland’s argument on the point of Muslim prayer is so feeble that one need only hold it to the standards of the revisionist school itself for it to collapse entirely.

1) Why is Holland putting words in Rav’s Mouth?:

The first problem with Holland’s argument is that Rav Yehudai does not actually mention the daily prayer as an example of Zoroastrian religious influence on Islam. Instead, Holland reaches this conclusion by open speculation. He asks, “What evidence might the rabbi have had for making such a claim?” Well, Zoroastrianism included a five-times-a-day prayer, he notes, so that was probably what Rav Yehudai meant. But speculation is unnecessary, since Rav Yehudai actually said exactly what he meant in the passage Holland cites. His comments about Zoroastrian converts to Islam involves how they tend not to give up drinking wine immediately, sometimes continuing to imbibe into the third generation.

2) How on Earth does Holland think this is a reliable historical source?

Let’s just pretend that Rav Yehudai was actually talking about the daily prayer practices of Zoroastrians/Muslims (which, of course, he never mentions at all). And let’s just assume that Rav Yehudai was making an accurate, fair observation about the practices around him in southern Iraq in the 750’s CE. The writings of Rav Yehudai must be more historically reliable than Muslim ones like Ibn Ishaq, right? What book of Rav Yehudai is Holland citing? Actually, he doesn’t cite any work by Rav Yehudai. His endnote cites the Sefer Ha-Eshkol, a work attributed to Rabbi Abraham ben Isaac, a rabbi living in southern France in the twelfth century. Nor does the Sefer Ha-Eshkol cite Rav Yehudai directly. Instead, Rav Yehudai’s report about Muslim converts comes via a senior rabbi of the Pumbedita rabbinic academy in Babylon who lived some three hundred years after Rav Yehudai, Rav Hayya Gaon (died 1038 CE).

So, Holland is saying that, in order to overcome the problem of Muslim sources like the biography of the Prophet by Ibn Ishaq, which was compiled in Baghdad a century and a half after Muhammad’s career, we should turn to a source written in France five centuries after Muhammad’s career? But, Holland might reply, Abraham ben Isaac was drawing on earlier reports and historical works, which we should trust. But this is exactly what Muslim historians like Ibn Ishaq claimed to be doing in their works, and the central criticism made by revisionists like Holland is that we can’t just trust that historians are reliably passing on earlier material.

But let us be charitable. Let’s assume that during the five centuries between the lives of Rav Yehudai Gaon and Abraham ben Isaac, five centuries of religious polemics and warfare between Christians, Jews and Muslims across the Mediterranean, that Rav Yehudai’s observation remained intact to be preserved for us in the Sefer Ha-Eshkol.

The problem is that the Sefer Ha-Eshkol itself is unreliable. As has been discussed for over a century by rabbinic scholars and scholars of Judaic studies, the 1868 Halberstadt edition of the Sefer that Holland relies on was a forgery produced by the famous nineteenth-century Rabbi and literary scholar Zvi Benjamin Auerbach (died 1878). This has led some leading scholars of rabbinic literature to conclude that the book “should not be used for historical purposes.”*

3) So what sources should we rely on for the origins of the five daily prayers?

Let’s indulge revisionist skepticism about historical sources written by Muslims. Let’s forget that the story of how and when the Prophet Muhammad instituted the five daily prayers, which Muslim scholars concluded either happened in 617 CE or soon before the Prophet’s emigration to Medina 622 CE, was recorded in major Muslim historical collections from the late 700’s and early 800’s. The earliest attested book in which this story appears in the Muwatta’ of Malik bin Anas (died. 796), which was compiled in Medina in the mid to late 700’s. Malik includes a report transmitted via a chain of narrators from the Prophet, who said, “Five prayers God has ordained for His servants, and whoever does them without treating them lightly, God has given that person a promise to grant them entrance into the Garden….” (Muwatta’: kitab salat al-layl, bab al-amr bi’l-witr). If we indulge in revisionist skepticism and assume that Malik was making up the whole transmission that he claims came from the Prophet, we would still know that, at least during Malik’s own lifetime in Medina, there was the clear idea that a core part of Islam was five daily prayers.

And then we could indulge more revisionism and insist on relying on non-Muslim sources. Since Rav Yehudai never mentions the Muslim prayer, why not look at a non-Muslim source that does? We could look at the T’ung tien, a Chinese Tang court work of history and geography that was published in 801 CE. It contains a description of Kufa by a Chinese soldier who was taken prisoner at the Battle of Talas in 751, spent years amongst the Muslims in Iraq and Iran, and returned to China in 762. One of the few observations that this Chinese soldier recalls of Kufa, which was the Abbasid capital at the time (Baghdad not being built until the 760′s), was that the Muslims there would pray five times a day.

So between the Muwatta of Malik and the T’ung tien, we know that Muslim communal practice in Medina and Kufa in the mid 700′s included the five daily prayers. This despite the fact that the two regions of Medina and Kufa had dramatically different traditions of Islamic law. So both regions must have inherited the prayer practice from a common, earlier practice, and there thus must have been some common origin for the five prayers. This would push the historical attestation for the practice back at least one generation to at least the early 700′s, only seventy or so years after the death of the Prophet.

4) When arrogant historians tell us that bring critical means ignoring the obvious

So we have a choice. We can believe Holland’s claim, based on an unreliable nineteenth-century forgery of a supposedly twelfth-century work from France quoting an eleventh-century rabbi in Baghdad quoting an eighth century rabbi from near Kufa, that, because Zoroastrian converts to Islam still liked to drink wine, that therefore the Muslim practice of praying five times a day, which, like wine drinking, Zoroastrians also did, must also have been imported into Islam from Zoroastrianism by Zoroastrian converts.

That, or, we can believe, based on historically attested Muslim and non-Muslim sources, which paint a reliable overall picture of Muslim practice in Kufa and Medina decades before Rav Yehudai supposedly made his observation, that the five daily prayers were widely accepted as a core practice of Islam by at least the early 700’s, only seventy or so years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.

Actually, Holland’s claim makes even less sense when we remember that the tradition of Islamic law in Kufa, where Holland has all these Zoroastrian practices and five-times-a-day-praying Zoroastrian sleeper converts supposedly influencing Muslims, actually argued for there being SIX required daily prayers (the sixth, the witr prayer, is still considered required in the Hanafi school that originated in Kufa). The Muwatta of Malik, on the other hand, written in Medina where Holland would have us assume that there were many fewer Zoroastrian converts wandering around, rejects the sixth prayer and insists on the supposedly Zoroastrian-based five times.

5) This is all unnecessary if you want to explain Islam’s roots

Holland and others make the arguments they do because they believe, quite reasonably, that nothing comes out of nowhere. People, ideas and customs have genealogies. So, could practices and beliefs promulgated in the Quran and the Prophet’s teachings be taken from elsewhere? Yes, of course. The Quran announces that some aspects of Islam are repeats from earlier prophetic messages: ‘O you who believe, fasting has been prescribed for you as it was for those who came before you’ (2:185). And there are well known reports that the Prophet Muhammad would follow the customs of the People of Book (basically, Jews) unless commanded by God to do otherwise (see Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Shama’il of al-Tirmidhi). So the origins of the five daily prayers, as taught by Muhammad in his new religion, may well lie in preexisting practices such as those of Zoroastrianism. But saying that Islam as a religion practiced and taught by Muhammad incorporated elements of earlier traditions is very different from saying that what Muslims believe to be a core teaching of their Prophet was actually adopted into Islam long after his death, and this adoption then covered up.

]]>http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/2015/tom-holland-the-five-daily-prayers-and-they-hypocrisy-of-revisionism/feed0Break the Fear Barrier – Write to a Prisonerhttp://www.drjonathanbrown.com/2014/break-the-fear-barrier-write-to-a-prisoner
http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/2014/break-the-fear-barrier-write-to-a-prisoner#commentsThu, 14 Aug 2014 19:55:35 +0000http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/?p=335Dozens of Muslims in the US have been imprisoned on trumped up charges or as the result of entrapment by the authorities. They are often abandoned by their friends and communities, sometimes even by their families. One of the few things that give them hope is a letter from the outside. Don’t let society intimidate you into forgetting that even those convicted of crimes are still human beings with rights…

Note: this lecture begins with Georgetown University’s President Jack DeGioia speaking and then Dr. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen giving an excellent talk on the Christian tradition.

The thirteenth Building Bridges Seminar, chaired by Professor Daniel A. Madigan, S.J., was held April 27-30, 2014 at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and the Airlie Center in Warrenton, Virginia. This year’s theme was “Sin, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation: Christian and Muslim Perspectives.” On the first afternoon, public lectures by Jonathan Brown and Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen provided an overview. On the second and third days of the seminar, seminar participants heard pairs of lectures that set the stage for detailed discussion in private sessions, focusing on relevant scriptural texts. Thus lectures on “sin” were given by Christoph Schwöbel and Ayman Shabana; on “forgiveness” by Susan Eastman (read in her absence by Joel Marcus) and Mohammad Khalil; and on “reconciliation” by Philip Sheldrake and Asma Afsaruddin. The proceedings of the seminar will be published in due course.

]]>http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/2014/human-sin-divine-forgiveness-and-human-reconciliation/feed0The Rules of Matn Criticism: There are No Ruleshttp://www.drjonathanbrown.com/2014/the-rules-of-matn-criticism-there-are-no-rules
http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/2014/the-rules-of-matn-criticism-there-are-no-rules#commentsSun, 10 Aug 2014 15:39:25 +0000http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/?p=301In an effort to avoid the subjectivity of individual reason, Sunni Islam elaborated a
method of ḥadīth criticism that subordinated evaluating the meaning of a report to
an examination of its chain of transmission. With the fourth/tenth-century epistemological
compromise of Ashʿarism, however, Sunni ḥadīth scholars adopted rationalist
criteria of content criticism that included explicit rules for rejecting ḥadīths because
of their meaning. is resulted in a strong internal tension within Sunni ḥadīth
criticism from the fifth/eleventh century onwards, with one and the same scholar
upholding rigid rules of content criticism but not employing them or even rejecting
them in application. e inherent subjectivity of content criticism resulted in different
Muslim scholars either rejecting or affirming the same ḥadīths. Some scholars were
much more inclined to reject a ḥadīth out of hand because of its meaning, while
others were willing to extend a ḥadīth more interpretive charity. e tension created
by the subjectivity of content criticism emerged in unprecedented relief in the modern
period, when ‘science’ and modern social norms presented an unmatched challenge
to the interpretive awe in which pre-modern (and Traditionalist scholars today) held
attributions to the Prophet.

Belief in the miracles of saints (karāmāt al-awliyāʾ) is a requirement in Sunni Islam. Challenges
to this position are generally seen as limited to Islamic modernists effected by Western historical
criticism. This article demonstrates that there have actually been leading Sunni Muslim scholars
from the fourth/tenth century until the modern period who held positions regarding the miracles
of saints that were much more skeptical than the mainstream Sunni stance. These ‘faithful dissenters’
were motivated by both theological and social concerns, and the methodologies they
presented for sifting true from false miracle claims were based entirely on indigenous Islamic
epistemological and textual criticism.

Named as one of the top books on religion of 2014 by The Independent…! Misquoting Muhammad takes the reader back in time through Islamic civilization and traces how and why such controversies developed, offering an inside view into how key and controversial aspects of Islam took shape. From the protests of the Arab Spring to Istanbul at the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and from the ochre red walls of Delhi’s great mosques to the trade routes of Islam’s Indian Ocean world, Misquoting Muhammad lays out how Muslim intellectuals have sought to balance reason and revelation, weigh science and religion, and negotiate the eternal truths of scripture amid shifting values.

In Sunni Islam, the canonical ‘Six Books’ of hadith derive their authority as doctrinal
references from scholarly consensus on their reliability as representations of the Prophet’s Sunna.
One of the Six Boooks, the Sunan of Ibn Majah, however, presents a bizarre exception. Although
it has been considered part of the Six Book collection since the late eleventh century, it has been
consistently and severely criticized by Sunni scholars for the large number of unreliable hadiths it
contains. Explaining the canonical status of Ibn Majah’s Sunan despite these criticisms requires
recognizing that the hadith canon was based not only on authenticity but also on utility. The Six
Books served to delimit the countless numbers of hadith in circulation into a manageable form, and
Ibn Majah’s Sunan added to this canonical body a useful number of hadiths not found in the other
Six Books. Sunni scholars themselves acknowledged that, in the case of Ibn Majah’s Sunan, utility
trumped authenticity in the Sunni hadith canon.

]]>http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/2011/the-canonization-of-ibn-majah-authenticity-vs-utility-in-the-formation-of-the-sunni-%e1%b8%a5adith-cano/feed0IS THE DEVIL IN THE DETAILS? Tension Between Minimalism and Comprehensiveness in the Shariahhttp://www.drjonathanbrown.com/2011/is-the-devil-in-the-details
http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/2011/is-the-devil-in-the-details#commentsFri, 19 Aug 2011 22:46:02 +0000http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/?p=242Summary:

The comprehensiveness of Islamic law has been questioned seriously in
the modern period by Muslim reformists like Rashīd Riḍā . Such reformists
have used as evidence Qur’anic verses and Prophetic reports that
seem to state clearly that the strictures of Islamic law are few and
limited and that Muslims should not extend them to all areas of life. How
could the Shariah have developed as a holistic and exhaustive body of
law in light of such evidence? Looking back at earlier Muslim scholars
from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries, however, we see that these
Qur’anic verses and Prophetic edicts were never understood in this way.
They were either diffused with various hermeneutic strategies or understood
as applying to debates unrelated to the comprehensiveness or
minimalism of the Shariah.

]]>http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/2011/is-the-devil-in-the-details/feed0Alukah.nethttp://www.drjonathanbrown.com/2011/alukah-net
http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/2011/alukah-net#commentsWed, 17 Aug 2011 21:10:43 +0000http://www.drjonathanbrown.com/?p=202Jonathan Brown and Abdur-Rahman Abou Almajd in dialog about how should the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) be introduced to the west?

Q: Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction, it is excellent introduction to the life of Muhammad, well balanced between elements of faith and rational discussions, 144 pages, it’s very Short Introduction, What do you want to add?

Dr. Brown: I wish I could have added more about Qawwali music. I would have liked to have been able to convey to the reader a sense of the intoxicating effect of listening to it and the way in which it can communicate and elevate religious devotion. I would have liked to talk about Ibn Sina’s Mirajname, a book in which he examines the Prophet’s (peace be upon him) ascension to heaven from a philosophical perspective. I wish I had mentioned how the Prophet sent food and allowed food to be sent to Mecca during a famine in the later years of the conflict between Medina and Mecca – even during a time of war and conflict he was a humanitarian figure. I wish I had been able to discuss the Sira al-Halabiyya, a very influential late medieval Siraof the Prophet. There are so many things I would have liked to add, but I think that I forgot most of them as a psychological device for suppressing my regret.

Q: The furor surrounding the Satanic Verses and the Danish cartoon crisis reminded the world of the tremendous importance of the prophet of Islam, Muhammad, How should the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) be introduced to the west?

Dr. Brown: This is a very good question to which I think there is no one answers. The West is not a monolith. Some non-Muslims in the US and Europe relate better to a ‘Protestant’ vision of the Prophet: a mere vehicle of revelation and an admirable leader. For these people, reading a sira like the Life of the Prophet by Muhammad Husayn Haykal is probably the best introduction. Others in the West are affected deeply by the Prophet as a holy man, as a locus of Baraka, as a miracle worker, as a focus of devotion. For these people, the Burda poem or the Kitab al-Shifa or even some Mawlid manuals might be a good way to communicate to them about the Prophet. Others really want to feel like they’re learning about him as a historical figure, in which case something like Karen Armstrong’s book on Muhammad or other such books might be the best way.

Q: The West’s Approach to Prophet Muhammad differs from Prophet Muhammad according to Islamic Tradition, how can we near Prophet Muhammad according to Islamic Tradition to them?

Dr. Brown: I think that often people have to have direct experience with devotion to the Prophet. Attending a Mawlid celebration, a Sufi Dhikr or even seeing how the Prophet is mentioned during a Jum`ah Khutbah would be useful.

Q: The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith, Could you elaborate on that?

Dr. Brown: This book was a result of my dissertation at the University of Chicago. For years I had wondered how the Sahihayn became ‘the Sahihayn‘. I was interested in how and why these two books attained their station, and what their various roles have been in Islamic civilization. I was also interested in debates over whether or not the books had been or could be criticized.

Q: Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World is a great introduction into the science of Hadith, and focuses on Hadiths, their collection and their criticism, early Hadith scholars focused on the Isnad , the Isnad’s quality, the quality of the Matn,
what do you say about Hadith great scholars?

Dr. Brown: I would say that I’m in awe of their work and that I was greatly humbled by my studies of Hadith. Whether or not a person believes that the Sunni Hadith tradition has managed to capture the true teachings of the Prophet, it is an intellectual edifice that deserves to be studied and held in awe by scholars from my point of view.

Q: The Weak Hadith, Weak narrations are not necessarily lies, you rarely mentioned “weak” as one of the classifications of Hadith, why?

Dr. Brown: I think that I mentioned weak Hadiths a lot in my Hadith book. I’m not sure why you think I didn’t. There is a whole chart illustrating the various types of flaws from which a Hadith could suffer, and that makes it very clear that an outright forgery is only the farthest end of the spectrum of weak Hadiths. I also recently wrote an article in the journal Islamic Law and Society entitled “Even if it’s Not True it’s True: the Use of Unreliable Hadiths in Sunni Islam“, which also makes it clear that Sunni Muslim scholars would never defend using a Hadith that they knew was a forgery.

Q: What do you say about “the genocidal Hadith” that mentioned by Robert Spencer to Fitzgerald?

Dr. Brown: I assume you’re asking about the Hadith about the End of Time when (satuqatilun al-yahud…) and even the rock saying that there is a Jew behind me? This Hadith is interesting; it’s in the Sahihayn, but in general in chapters on Malahim(Apocalyptic events and signs) chapters or by the same Isnad in a jihad chapter. From the perspective of Sunni Hadith criticism, the Hadith is Sahih. But it is also possible that, since Muslim scholars from the time of `Abdul-Rahman bin Mahdi (d. 197) onward treated Hadiths dealing with Malahim with much less critical rigor than Hadiths on law, that this Hadith might still be unreliable but was approved by Sunni critics because they did not see it as having any great import. To look at things from that perspective, you would have to step outside the science of Sunni Hadith criticism as it has generally been understood and take the position that all evaluations made by classical critics on Hadiths dealing with Adab,Malahim, and Tafsir should be treated as a separate tier of Hadiths. This degree of reevaluation would not be acceptable to many Sunni Hadith scholars today.

Q: You present Abdullah Al-Sa’d as a fellow “Traditional Salafi” of Al-Albani, what else would you like to present?

Q:Is the demonization of political Islamism in Western Europe an overstatement?

Dr. Brown: I think the demonization of political Islam anywhere is an overstatement. One can disagree with a political stance or vision without considering at existential threat.Also, demonization blinds people to understanding the forces that motivate people to believe in a certain ideology and to try and achieve some degree of reconciliation.

Q:Islam is a religion of peace, yet many in the West remain suspicious that Islam is not at all a peaceful faith. Resolving this crisis of authority will take several generations , Could you elaborate on that?Dr. Brown: People in the West need to realize that the Muslims who are engaged in acts of violence are a tiny, tiny fraction of Muslims worldwide… maybe .03%. The rest of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims lead normal lives as parents, children, friends, employees, people trying to get food to eat or make a living.

These people are all Muslims, and they are not violent. So clearly Islam does not cause violence. I would read Robert Pape’s latest book on the roots of suicide bombing on this.